Touch screens are increasingly being implemented in many devices in which it is desirable to combine the display and controls of a user interface. For example, in mobile devices, which are compact by nature, there has been a movement to replace traditional controls such as buttons or wheels with touch screen interfaces. By incorporating the controls into the touch screen, there is more flexibility in the design of the user interface and a larger portion of the device can be occupied by a viewable display.
Even with the enlarged displays on some mobile devices, it can be difficult for the device to accurately identify the user's intended touch point on the touch screen. In some cases, when a user is tapping quickly on the screen, such as when typing, during a touch the user's finger slides across the screen by some distance making the intended target difficult to detect. If the device is to presume that either the initial contact point or the release point is the target touch location, that may be incorrect as the actual target point may be somewhere between the two.
In other circumstances, the user may intentionally drag a finger across the screen. If, for example, the initially touches the screen at a first location, but intended to touch at a second location, the user may correct the touch point by dragging a finger across the screen towards the intended touch point. In that case, if the device presumes that the initial touch point or an intermediate point is the target touch point, the device may again inaccurately identify the target touch point.
As such, the identification of a user's intended target touch point on a touch screen is sometimes affected by the user's behavior while using the touch screen device.